Friday, May 30, 2008

In response to all this "verb tense shit" from McCain campaign, who has been claiming it's just petty semantics that McCain said "we have drawn down to pre-surge levels" (FALSE by 20,000 humans) and he meant "we are drawing down to pre-surge levels" (sure, with ponies on the way, too), Hilzoy writes:

Still, it's nice to know in advance that we can expect John McCain not to care about the difference between past, present, and future. It will be very useful, if he becomes President, to know that he regards a statement like "I have taken action" as equivalent to "I will, eventually, get around to doing something, but I haven't yet", and that he takes "I have already made all the documents available" and "several decades from now, I will get around to releasing them" to be interchangeable.